Delicate Strings
by Zarius
Summary: Charged with the Quantum Bolt, Mayday reflects on it's power, and how it threatens to poison possibility


**SPIDER-GIRL:**

**DELICATE STRINGS**

**WRITTEN BY ZARIUS**

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><p><strong>Note:<strong> Well, as any fan of Mayday knows, ASM#8 sees her return to the printed page as part of the _Spider-Verse_ comics event. Alas, it seems Dan Slott has chosen to put her and her family through the emotional wringer. I know some of you are probably upset by this, but hey, look on the bright side, this could easily be retconned down the road as one of many similar alternate realitys.

Relax. It's comics. The continuous positive and negative of this business is this:

Everything is temporary.

DC's Helena Wayne was killed off in _Crisis on Infinite Earths_, and she's currently active as Huntress again. Hell, _all of Earth-2 was destroyed once in the same event,_ and has since been restored/rebooted

So here's a little story to keep some fresh hope alive until the day Marvel gives Mayday stability again. There's no true despair without it!

-Zarius

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><p><strong>Disclaimer:<strong> Mayday and the MC2 Universe are owned and trademarked by Marvel Comics.

My name is May Parker and I'm not allowed to take strange things home with me.

That's the rule.

It's occasionally bent when push comes to shove, but anything that could pose a true danger to the family need not be invited so readily into the Parker household.

This is a tad different. It poses no danger. At least not to anyone staring inside the window, looking within the worlds on offer like they were a snow glob_e_

No, this is something that affects only the mind.

In my hand I hold the Quantum Bolt. Recovered from the Neither Prisms by a contingent of Spider-Men led by a version of my father that had been seasoned in multi-dimensional experience. That and a few other hang-ups.

He told me my mom was made out of H20 in his universe. Very weird.

He also told me to take this to my dad, he said he'd understand. He had helped recover the bolt once before from the Frightful Four.

It is said it can create and sustain a whole multi-verse. Not just one world or two, but a vast infinite realm of possibility.

Most of the time the bolt was used to channel positive messages, and as a result it created worlds with positive outcomes. But then it became corrupted by the High Evolutionary of the Counter-Earth once visited by the Spider-Man that had seemingly seen the unlimited scope of every possible reality. The bolt was injected with a type-A disruptive pathogen forged from the blood of a cloned chaos demon. The Quantum Bolt began corrupting and disrupting the otherwise perfectly stable realitys, infecting the thoughts and feelings of the people inhabiting it's network of parallel worlds, causing them to act out-of-character.

I recall the strange dreams I had not too long ago, nightmares of a brand new day that invited big time change, only to lead to less than superior heartbreak.

My mom told me we Parkers would never break like that in real life.

The nightmares continued even after that. I dreamt a whole plethora of hunters called "Inheritors" came looking for my family seeking to feast on something called Totem energy, they broke into our house and burned it to the ground. Nobody was safe. Not Mom, not Dad. Not even Wes.

Wes. I have to keep him safe from the strange, strange things I bring home to us.

So many responsibilities.

I took a peek inside the bolt, a small triangular orb held aloft within a glass hexagon prism, tiny nebulas dancing around each other, nested together like bees in a hive.

It was like looking through a kaleidoscope. The bolt sensed it was being observed, and it opened it's realms to the splinter of my eye. I saw the corruption first hand, the inversions, the axis, the avenged and the x in the equation, disassembling, reassembling, I saw the Other, I saw the totem, I saw the Silk, I saw the turn of the cat, I saw...

...Nonsense.

Utter. Nonsense.

My mom would turn and mock the strange let alone face it. The High-Evolutionary had sacrificed consistency of character for inane stunts that flew in the face of how the heroes of my world, the heroes of many reality's, acted. This was an _anti-verse_, a nexus of improbable decision making and poor choices.

What manner of evolution do you call this?

Of course, I realized this was the counter-Earth Evolutionary, so it would make sense out of how counter-productive this all was.

And worse, I glimpsed worlds where my nightmares had come true.

The bolt's nature remains a mystery, it contains within a fragment of space and time, what if every creeping thought, every fear, every weakness, had been channelled into the bolt like a conduit? What if the bolt in turn channelled it out?

Chicken and the egg syndrome. What passed through first?

The strings that bind this web of life together are delicate, and it surprises me that we Parkers can be made to look as fragile as butter in these worlds of negative consequences

I need to bring the strange homeward. I need to tell my dad, and we need to fulfil a promise.

No matter who ore what comes looking for the Quantum Bolt, we Parkers will not scatter, we will not flee.

We will fight.

We will endure.

And we will survive.

That is the only possibility I will tolerate.

As for why the bolt is within my hands, what my dad needs to know, these questions are best left to the future.

And there's a good possibility my dad will ground me for bending the rule in that forthcoming future.

**THE END...FOR NOW**


End file.
